With the advent of the computer age, computer and software users have grown accustomed to user-friendly software applications that help them write, calculate, organize, prepare presentations, send and receive electronic mail, make music, and the like. For example, modern electronic word processing applications allow users to prepare a variety of useful documents. Modern spreadsheet applications allow users to enter, manipulate, and organize data. Modern electronic slide presentation applications allow users to create a variety of slide presentations containing text, pictures, data or other useful objects.
Many users of such software applications are enabled to prepare professional quality documents, presentations, and the like, without having a professional services company do the work for them. While word processing and slide presentation applications have an increasing variety of options for text and other data placement and presentation, some aspects still remain restrictive. For example, many applications dealing with text have limited alignment and positioning capabilities.
Tabs are one of the features used in word processing and similar applications for positioning text within a page or a slide. Current technology provides an absolute position for the tabs relative to the page they are on. This may result in undesirable text positioning if features of the page such as margins, indents, or orientation of the page are modified. For example, on an 8.5″ wide page with 1.25″ left and right margins, left/center/right tab positions from the left margin may be 1.25″/4.25″/7.25″. Because these positions are relative to a left margin of the page, the tab positions may become 1″/4.125″/7″ from the left margin if the margins are changed to 1″.
In addition, tab positions may be modified in an undesirable manner when text blocks such as paragraphs are copied or moved from one application to another, for example, from a word processing document to a slide presentation or an electronic mail document.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.